Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out.[35] For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She spent several summers near the end of her life on the island of North Haven, Maine. She taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She commented, "I don't think I believe in writing courses at all, it's true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged."[4]
Elizabeth Bishop HouseIn 1971 Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel, who became her literary executor.[36] Never a prolific writer, Bishop noted that she would begin many projects and leave them unfinished. Two years after publishing her last book, Geography III (1977),[4] she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston, and is buried in Hope Cemetery (Worcester, Massachusetts).[37] Her requested epitaph, the last two lines from her poem "The Bight" — "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful" — was added, along with her inscription, to the family monument in 1997, on the occasion of the Elizabeth Bishop Conference and Poetry Festival in Worcester.[38]
After her death, the Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia, was dedicated to her memory. Vassar College Library acquired her literary and personal papers in 1981. Her personal correspondence and manuscripts appear in numerous other literary collections in American research libraries.[39]
